Posts Tagged ‘hubris’

On a lark, I picked up China Mieville’s Embassytown to reread. I read this back when it came out in 2011, and it blew my mind. (I even wrote a pretty good review!) I remember being intimidated by the vocabulary, of having dictionary.com open while I was reading. I remember that at the time I wondered if half the words were made up, or if Mieville was trying to prove that he was smart and I was dumb. I was the girl who read what was given to her. Maybe Mieville was just telling me to pick up a damn dictionary already.

On this reread, pen in hand, I decided to underline every word I didn’t know. I underlined maybe five words? All of which I could figure out contextually. That girl, the one who got all defensive because she ran into words she didn’t know? Eight years later that girl is a stranger to me. These days, words I don’t know are like eating a fruit i’ve never had, or a dessert i’ve never heard of, or gaining access to the rare book room at the library. They are a joy.

Speaking of weird words I don’t know Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tasted like mochi and illuminated manuscripts . To put that in context, the first time I tasted Mochi I cried with joy.

(Words you don’t know is like rehearsing with a jam band. You want to be the worst musician in the room, because that guarantees you’ll learn from the other musicians. Being the best musician in a jam band is boring – you risk not becoming a better musician)

I can’t talk about Embassytown without talking about language, and how spoken communication is both more and less about the actual words that come out of our mouths. My fave subgenre of scifi is books that deal with language, linguistics, first contact, communication. I hate the word “communication”, it is such a bland, cheap sounding word for something that encompasses basically everything.

This post has minor and major spoilers for Embassytown. Consider yourself warned. But like any Mieville book, i can tell you what happens at the end, and it won’t spoil any of the good parts of the book for you.

In the book Embassytown, the aliens, the Ariekei, speak with two mouths, two voices at once. If what they are saying is two syllables, they say both syllables at the same time. The way this is presented within in the text fantastic, it looks something like this:

It takes two humans, speaking at the same time, to speak in Language that the aliens will understand. One human talking just sounds like white noise to them. They hear sound (maybe?) but the sounds are just noise.

FTC Stuff

some of the books reviewed here were free ARCs supplied by publishers/authors/other groups. Some of the books here I got from the library. the rest I *gasp!* actually paid for. I'll do my best to let you know what's what.